A low-cost system for measuring and analyzing human movement in three dimensions

This paper describes a system for measuring the three-dimensional movement of a point on the human body. The core components of the system are an ultrasonic computer mouse (The OWL), an IBM-compatible personal computer, and a suite of recording and analysis software written in National Instruments’ LabVIEW instrumentation programming language. The cost of these components is sufficiently low that we have been able to create a system for measuring human kinematics that is within the reach of a typical budget for student practical classes.